Current network architectures often contain a heterogenous mixture of information stores, including databases and directories. These information stores may contain personal and professional contact information, product information, certificates and public key data for authenticating users, network user account information, and other information necessary for maintaining a business or another enterprise. These disparate information stores may be stored on different servers in the network; a single information store, such as one accessed using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), may reside on more than one server.
In practice, as information is added to one or more of these information stores, it is added on an ad hoc basis. The party entering information chooses an appropriate or available information store, depending on accessibility or authorization to use an information store, and enters the available information into the information store. For example, a directory entry may be created on one server to record a person's e-mail address and telephone number and, at another time, certificate information for that person might be added to a database. Later, that person's mobile number might be added to the previous directory, or to yet another directory or database within the same network.
In effect, identification information relating to a single user (certificates, telephone number, mobile number, e-mail addresses, mailing address, and other contact and authentication information) is split over multiple databases, directories, or servers. An example of the difficulty associated with storing identification information in such a way occurs when a user with a mobile communication device seeks to send secure electronic mail to a recipient within the same organization. The sender will be required to retrieve the recipient's e-mail contact information from the organization's LDAP server, and to also retrieve, in a separate step, the recipient's certificate information from a separate certificate store. Where the communication device stores such information in a personal information store, the single information store will have, as a result of the two separate information retrieval steps, two separate directory entries for the recipient: one for the e-mail contact information, and one for the certificate. The separate storage of the individual information on the network is replicated on the communication device.
As is indicated above, while a collection of individual information may be available on a single network, it is typically not all available to a user in a coherent format. A solution to this is to merge the information. However, the differing infrastructures of the different information stores mean that a simple merge is not possible. To merge such disparate individual information on a network typically requires a server-based system that will carry out a separate process in which all information stores are queried for information that relates to selected user identities. Such a system will then request user input to determine how to merge the located information. This approach to merging the individual information on the network includes a potentially high network overhead as well as disruptive and time-consuming user interaction while the merge is being carried out.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system and method for merging the content of two or more individual information stores on a network. It is furthermore desirable to provide an automated and efficient manner of providing individual information to a mobile communication device for storage in a personal information store.